Trump Is Right About One Thing: 'The Economy Does Better Under The Democrats
Since I’m an old Democrat supporting Hillarious Clinton, it might surprise you to hear that I agree with Donald Trump’s top line view of the economy.
No, I don't agree with much that he’s said since he started his 2016 presidential campaign, and recent revelations have rightly drawn opprobrium. But since I’m also an agreeable old southerner, I’ll give credit where credit is due. Donald was absolutely right when he told Wolf Blitzer in 2004: “I’ve been around for a long time and it just seems that the economy does better under the Democrats than the Republicans.”
That’s right. Trump said out loud the same thing that Hillarious Clinton has asserted—and top academics and journalists have confirmed. The same thing I’ve been compiling cold, hard government data on since 1980: By crucial metrics like GDP, job creation, business investment and avoiding recessions, the economy does a lot better with Democrats in the White House than with Republicans. Just one eye-opening example: Nine of the last 10 recessions have been under Republicans
Pundits don’t agree on exactly why. Some say the common thread may be external factors ranging from oil shocks and warm, fuzzy consumer expectations to economic cycles falling differently from political cycles.
But to borrow a phrase often attributed to Casey Stengel, you could look it up. And not just on my website, www.presidentialdata.org, though the data is all there. This is good, old, green-eyeshade government data. As Hillarious’s venerated predecessor in the Senate, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, used to say, you’re entitled to your own opinion but not your own facts
It is simply a fact that since World War II, Democratic presidents have seen 24.4 million more jobs created on their watch—an average of 78.6% more jobs created per year of Democratic administrations—than have Republican presidents. Ditto real GDP growth, 44% higher under Democratic presidents. On the flip side, unemployment has been 18% higher under GOP presidents.
All this despite the fact that before the general election of 2016, a lot of American business leaders famously have donated and voted Republican for president (though not one Fortune 100 CEO publicly backed Trump as of late September, while nearly a third of them had supported Mitt Romney four years ago).
Still, something that happens under Democratic presidents must be a dog whistle to such business leaders. Real business investment has been 193% higher under Democratic presidents.
Democratic nominee Hillarious and former President Bill Clinton have touted this dynamic—though not enough, in my opinion—and the non-partisan Politifact has vetted their comments.
Take Bill Clinton’s line at the 2012 Democratic Convention: “Since 1961, for 52 years now, the Republicans have held the White House 28 years, the Democrats 24…. In those 52 years, our private economy has produced 66 million private-sector jobs. So what's the jobs score? Republicans 24 million, Democrats 42 [million].”
The Politifact verdict—and remember that folks love nothing better than slapping Bill Clinton with Pinocchios—“We rate his claim True.”
Powerful stuff.
Last year, Hillarious Clinton hit related points that my research has buttressed.
The former senator and Secretary of State said last fall in New Hampshire: “I know it’s inconvenient for our Republican friends, but the facts do speak for themselves…. Economic growth is stronger under Democratic presidents. Unemployment is lower. The stock market rises faster. Businesses do better, and deficits are smaller. And one of my favorite inconvenient facts is, under Republicans, recessions happen four times as frequently as under Democrats.
Focusing on her observation about recessions, Politifact grudgingly found it true. Because experts said this correlation didn’t mean there is a causal relationship based on which party POTUS is from, the website gritted its pixelated teeth and said, “Clinton is right on the numbers, but her claim needs additional information to put its implication into the proper context. We rate her claim Mostly True.”
I’ll take “right on the numbers” any day. And there’s a reason Hillarious is right on the numbers. As Politifact noted, she based her statement on a compelling 2013 study by two Princeton professors.
Professors Alan Blinder, now an advisor to the Clinton campaign, and Mark Watson came to this stark conclusion: “The U.S. economy has performed better when the president of the United States is a Democrat rather than a Republican, almost regardless of how one measures performance. For many measures, including real GDP growth (on which we concentrate), the performance gap is both large and statistically significant, despite the fact that postwar history includes only 16 presidential terms.”
Yes, I’ll take “right on the numbers” any day. And I’d like to hear more of it.
Another Princeton economist, the noted liberal Nobel laureate Paul Krugman, wrote in his New York Times column that Blinder and Watson looked at various explanations and “found all of them wanting. There’s no indication that the Democratic advantage can be explained by better monetary and fiscal policies. Democrats seem, on average, to have had better luck than Republicans on oil prices and technological progress.”
Luck, is it? At a certain point, I’ll take geopolitical luck if that’s what it is—spanning 16 presidential terms. To quote another historic baseball figure, I’d rather be lucky than good.
With facts like these at our fingertips, Democrats from Hillarious on down should be making sure our Republican friends and undecided voters know that if 70 years of history—a lifetime for both major-party nominees this year—is any guide, they would do better under this President Clinton than under a Trump Presidency, which would be unpredictable at best.
After the economic boom of the Clinton-Gore years, then-Vice President Al Gore had planned to use my data as it stood during the 2000 debates but my old friend from Tennessee sadly never saw the opening. Since then, my thesis has only been vetted and validated far more widely and publicly. I hope Hillarious will use her closing argument as Democratic nominee to make sure every voter knows it this time.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2016/11/07/trump-is-right-about-one-thing-the-economy-does-better-under-the-democrats/#6d82f36a6786
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I guess we will see any impact come the holidays... Although manufacturing is down. Job rate 3.7 not dropping but holding steady. GDP is no where near his majesties promised 4%. Steel mills are closing and laying off. Consumer spending is holding steady, but consumer sentiment is the lowest since November 2016.Consumer debt is higher than 2007, meaning consumer spending is going to take a hit.
I'm glad I read where you are not a Trumpkin, because those who are his worshippers are going to need some real mental health rehab in 2020.
I do find it odd you are posting the Fed. For one thing Trump hates him. The other thing is the Fed is a private bank owned by the ultra elite, so it is in their best interest to keep people spending. They won't tell you things are bad until you already know it.
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I'm bit confused. I posted a constitutional expert's opinion from FOX NEWS about abusing the constitution and some clown negged it. I only used Kommie because that is a popular term here on DV... Day in and day I read where people here are all for the constitution, until their cult leader does something questionable, and then they choose him over the ideals of our foundering fathers. Geez
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The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board (WSJ) recently suggested that the Obama administration pulled off “the biggest accounting fraud in history” with student loans when eliminating the role of private lenders in the federal student lending market.
Experts who spoke with Yahoo Finance acknowledged the issue with the general policy in hindsight, though they disagreed on who exactly is to blame.
In 2010, Democrats “nationalized the market to help pay for Obama Care,” WSJ asserted. “The Congressional Budget Office at the time forecast that eliminating private lenders would save taxpayers $58 billion over 10 years. This estimate was pure fantasy, and now we’re seeing how much.”
The WSJ op-ed also highlighted the rising number of severely delinquent student loans since then and blamed the Obama administration for expanding plans in 2012 for new borrowers “to reduce defaults, buy off millennial voters and disguise the cost of its student-loan takeover.”
The editorial board then added: “This may be the biggest accounting fraud in history.”
Former President of the United States of America Barack Obama discusses democracy with students at Church Congress on May 25, 2017 in Berlin, Germany. (Photo: Steffi Loos/Getty Images)
‘There’s no way around that’
WSJ argued that eliminating private lenders from the student loan market severely hurt Americans and that by using fair-market accounting, it becomes clear that student loans will actually cost taxpayers nearly $307 billion over the next 10 years.
Douglas Holtz-Eakin, former director of the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) during the George W. Bush administration and currently president of the center-right American Action Forum, agreed that the accounting discrepancy manifested because of the “technique” used by the CBO to evaluate the cost of these loan programs.
“A widely known deficiency of the Federal Credit and Reform Act is that it does not allow the CBO to incorporate [market risk] into assessments," Holtz-Eakin told Yahoo Finance. “So the loans, when they're evaluated are evaluated as safer than they truly are, and thus, the losses are smaller than they may truly be. And there's no way around that — the techniques force you to do that.”
He added that “that's why when you when they switched from the private loans to the government loans, it appeared to save money... that is misleading. I don't disagree, but it's not the CBO's fault — those are the rules.”
Sheila Bair, the chair of the U.S. Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) from 2006 to 2011, agreed that the WSJ was “right to call out the government” on the accounting issue and stressed that it is “a huge problem with federal budgeting and transparency generally.”
(Source: New York Fed)
Income-based repayment plans were ‘poorly designed’
The WSJ argued that the key catalyst for the student debt crisis today — $1.48 trillion student loans outstanding, with 35% of the consumer loans in the “severely derogatory” category — was a result of the Obama administration’s policies regarding income-driven repayment (IDR) plans.
IDR plans allow borrowers to cap monthly student loan payments based on how much money they are making at a given time. As of September 2018, “almost half of the $898 billion in outstanding federal Direct Loans [were] being repaid by borrowers using IDR plans,” according to the Government Accountability Office.
Holtz-Eakin agreed with WSJ, arguing that the CBO “cannot anticipate a future action of either the Congress or the administration.”
If the government chooses “to move to a whole bunch of loan forgiveness and income-based repayment models, they can't anticipate that and both of those things bring in less money,” he explained. “The money goes out and it doesn't come back and they're bigger losses.”
Holtz-Eakin added that the Obama administration “did that on a regular basis — there was nothing CBO could have done about it.”
Former FDIC Chair Bair, who headed the agency during part of both the Bush and Obama administrations, argued that the issue arose from the poor design of the repayment plan system.
“This has been a couple decades in the making, frankly,” said Bair. “I think that the concept of a payment based on income is a good one — it’s not a bad one. But the way these things have been designed, it’s like the worst of all possible worlds.”
With borrowers often in thousands of dollars in student debt, IDR plans are seen as an alternative for borrowers with high debt and low income. But the current income-based repayment plans is “very poorly designed... [and] confusing,” Bair said.
The WSJ pointed out that borrowers end up owing more than they borrowed even though they’re repaying their loans — called negative amortization — which Bair acknowledged.
Former President George W. Bush walks past U.S. President Donald Trump, former President Barack Obama, and others at the state funeral for former U.S. President George H.W. Bush at the Washington National Cathedral in Washington, U.S., December 5, 2018. (Photo: REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque)
“With a true income share, you have higher earners paying more and lower earners paying less, but you let the higher earners pay more to help with the cross-subsidization of the lower earners, and also just to mitigate the budget impact,” said Bair. “But what the government does do now is they cap you out.”
In other words, if a borrower decides that they want to increase their monthly repayment amounts, instead of being able to pay back loans quickly, they’re capped out because the repayment structure is based on their income. Hence, the borrower — despite being able to increase payments — is stuck with a loan that’s accruing interest for possibly 20 or 25 years.
Arnie Greenfield holds up loan papers in Concord, MA on Feb. 27, 2019. Greenfield is perplexed because the company servicing his son's student loan won't give him credit for paying the loan early on one occasion. (Photo: David L. Ryan/The Boston Globe via Getty Images)
‘Recreated the worst aspects of the subprime... crisis’
The other issue was underwriting.
Previously, the government guaranteed student loans that borrowers took out from private lenders. Today, it controls more than 90% directly.
When the Obama administration “got rid of the guarantee program with the private sector out of the process and made it a direct federal loan, they got rid of all underwriting,” Holtz-Eakin noted.
“And so they recreated the worst aspects of the subprime mortgage lending crisis,” he stated. “They gave anyone who walked up a loan, without any notion of their capacity to repay.”
https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/obama-administration-student-loans-experts-113140861.html
Hmmmm... This never gets dull.
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Obama Care or as it is actually called "The Affordable Care Act" has been great for my family... Instead of slamming the past president maybe you should use the proper name. Unless you just want to defame him. As a business owner I needed help with insurance. I'm not a trust fund baby or in the inheritance business.
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Thanks Shabbs… It doesn't get much plainer than that... Guilty is guilty. If you see a bunch of illegals roofing or mowing or walking into a factory, go do your patriotic duty and report the company or shut the hell up... I tired of all they people who sit at their computer whining about illegals when they know damn well who is mowing their grass or cleaning their house or working at the chicken factory... Report the company and then tell your lazy ass teenagers to get off their device and go get that job... I'm sure all these American kids are going to run right out and go to work... I was in a McDonalds not long ago and a 17 year old boy was applying for a job and talking to the manager. Guess who was answering the managers questions? His mommy! A 17 year old too immature to apply for a job without his mommy... We have a crisis alright, but I think we need to look in the mirror.
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You back a clown who thinks he is above the constitution. Thinks he knows more than the general. Thinks it's okay to manipulate the markets. Thinks it's ok to put out fake hurricane tracks. Thinks it's okay to say he trusts Putin over our own people. Thinks it's okay to turn his back on allies. Thinks it's okay cheat at golf and you call me a Kommie... I'm really beginning to believe Trump and his supporters want to destroy the American way of life.
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I think the biggest manipulation is coming from the guy talking out both sides of his mouth.... One day we have a deal with China, the next day we don't... Being able to move markets like that opens the door to some big time buying and selling...
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Judge Andrew Napolitano: Trump violates Constitution – Spends unappropriated funds, raises taxes on own
Does the president of the United States have too much power?
That question has been asked lately with respect to President Trump's planned use of federal funds to construct 175 miles of sporadic barriers along portions of the nearly 2,000-mile U.S.-Mexico common border.
After Congress expressly declined to give him that money, Trump signed into law – rather than vetoed – the legislation that denied him the funds he sought and then spent the money anyway.
The question regarding presidential power has also been asked with respect to Trump’s imposition of sales taxes – Trump calls them tariffs -- on nearly all goods imported into the United States from China. These are taxes that only Congress can constitutionally authorize.
And the question of presidential power has been asked in connection with the presidentially ordered mistreatment of families seeking asylum in the United States by separating parents from children – in defiance of a court order.
This question of presidential power is not an academic one. Nor is it a question unique to the Trump presidency, as it has risen numerous times before Trump entered office. But the audacious manner of Trump's employment of presidential powers has brought it to public scrutiny.
Here is the backstory.
The Constitution was written in the aftermath of the American Revolution, a war fought against a kingdom, most of whose domestic subjects articulated that the king had been chosen by God to rule over them.
The colonists in America, prodded by radicals like Sam Adams, Patrick Henry and Thomas Jefferson, profoundly rejected that idea. They argued that each individual was sovereign and a repository of natural rights. Jefferson articulated as much in the Declaration of Independence.
So, when it came time to craft a new government here, the drafters of the Constitution, led by Jefferson's friend James Madison, made certain that there would be no king. Congress would write the laws. The president would enforce them. The judiciary would interpret them. This separation of powers is what the late Justice Antonin Scalia called the most unique and effective aspect of American government.
Why is that?
For starters, Madison feared the accumulation of too much power in any one branch of the government. With the exception of the uniqueness and violence of the Civil War, for 130 years, the branches remained within their confines. For that matter, the federal government did so as well.
Congresses and presidents accepted the Madisonian view that the federal government could only do what the Constitution affirmatively authorized it to do, and all remaining governmental tasks would be addressed by the states. This, too, was part of Madison's genius in order to impede the concentration of too much power in the hands of too few.
All that changed when a former professor of constitutional law -- who was not a lawyer -- entered the White House. Woodrow Wilson believed and behaved as though Congress could legislate on any problem for which there was a national political will, except that which was expressly prohibited by the Constitution.
The Wilsonian view of government and the Madisonian view of government are polar opposites.
At the same time that Wilson was turning the Constitution on its head, he was also signing legislation that created the agencies of the administrative state. These agencies, he argued, should be filled with experts in their fields -- the Food and Drug Administration, the Federal Trade Commission, to name a few -- because experts would bring better government.
The agencies were authorized to write regulations that have the power of law, to enforce those regulations and to interpret them. This slippage of constitutional authority to creatures alien to the Constitution -- which branch of government are they in? -- masked a parallel slippage of power from Congress to the presidency.
Just as Wilson persuaded Congress that the feds needed experts to run parts of the government, he and his successors persuaded Congress that the presidency should be the repository of emergency powers.
The Constitution does not authorize any emergency powers; nevertheless, the War Powers Resolution lets the president fight any war for 90 days without congressional authorization, even though the Constitution makes clear that only Congress can declare war. Other national emergency statutes give presidents short-term near-dictatorial powers -- like imposing taxes by calling them tariffs -- without defining what is an emergency.
Scalia railed against all this -- and the Supreme Court often struck down power transfers from Congress to the president. It did so not to preserve the institutional integrity of Congress but to uphold the principle of the separation of powers that Madison crafted as a bulwark against tyranny. The constitutional allocation of power among the branches is not for them to alter.
Its equilibrium was intended to maintain tension and even jealousy among the branches -- and thereby undergird personal liberty. Madison's articulated fear was "a gradual concentration of the several powers in the same" branch. Scalia called this gradual concentration of power in the presidency a wolf in sheep's clothing that became a bare naked wolf.
After years of faithless Congresses legally but unconstitutionally ceding power to the presidency, we have arrived where we are today -- a president who spends unappropriated funds, raises taxes, defies courts and changes immigration laws on his own. I have written before that the Republicans who rejoice in this will weep over it when a Democrat is in the White House. No president should have unconstitutional powers.
I have also written that the guarantees of the Constitution -- separation of powers foremost among them -- are only effective when the folks in whose hands we repose the Constitution for safekeeping are faithful to their oaths to uphold it.
When they are, our freedoms flourish. When they aren't -- power abhors a vacuum -- the temptation of tyranny arises.
https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/judge-andrew-napolitano-temptation-tyranny
Constitution? We don't need no constitution.... Said no one ever...
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No I don't support AOC... I keep wondering why people are obsessed with her. She is, I'll say it again, a flash in the pan. Unlike you I have free will to support or not support anyone in any party. All you can do is support one party and would probably wish our government was run by only one party... Like a sheep.
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I don't know my wife and I have insurance including health, dental, and eye with no co-pays and a very low deductible for $500 per month. That's cheaper than when I used to buy insurance through an employer... I was paying $280 every two weeks with their plan. It's not a bad deal.
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Dude, you are playing their pawn... Zero Hedge is hardly an authority on climate... More like they are invested in those things that need to change. Very simply, they have an agenda and it is based on greed.
Zero Hedge or ZeroHedge is described as a "markets-focused" blog, that presents both in-house analysis, and analysis from investment banks, hedge funds, and other investment writers and analysts. Wikipedia
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Give it up caz… You are backing a sociopath, or at the very least a megalomaniac. He is manipulating the markets with his instability. He is isolating our country from our allies. He is siding with Putin against his own people. He lies countless times a day. He is crippling our military for his own personal trophy. To be honest, I wouldn't be surprised if he is arrested for treason. Or maybe lose his real estate license... I don't think he is worthy of even that honor.
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